Genre: Dark Comedy/Action
Director: Jonathan Lynn
Writers: Malcolm Taylor & Jack Ryder (story by)
Cast: Bruce Willis, Frank Grillo, Beanie Feldstein, Mark Proksch
Lex Powell (Bruce Willis) and Tank Brister (Frank Grillo) are a duo of mafia hitmen who share a certain rapport after years of working together. We begin with a montage of them killing throughout the years. In the present, they keep smalltalk about their lives and the latest Bills game as they drive to their next job. As they are executing the hit in an alleyway, Tank notices a car slowly driving by and seemingly taking a picture of them using a camera on top of the car. Once Lex kills the person, Tank tells him about what he just saw. They both seem annoyed and then decide they need to tail that car and get their hands on that picture.
In a small smart car, Jess (Beanie Feldstein) is singing along to the Spice Girls as she drives slowly down the street. She gets a call from her supervisor Stan (Mark Proksch) who asks how her route is going. She quickly turns down the music to say it is going great. Behind her on the road, Lex and Tank sound off on their annoyance about the size of these smart cars these days. As they near Jess’s car, they notice big letters on the back read “GOOGLE”. They talk about how weird it is that a website would have a car.
They motion Jess to pull over and she sees this but then shrugs her shoulders since it isn’t a police car. They inch closer and continue flashing their lights at her while she motions at them to just go around them. They pull up beside her and Tank in the passenger seat tells her to pull over. She rolls down her window and explains that she is on the job and that driving is a part of that. Lex sighs, pulls ahead and then gets in front of her car and slowing down. Jess’s heart is beating as she decides to go around them and speed off, leading to a chase through Buffalo between Lex’s muscle car and Jess’s Google Street View car.
As the chase winds down, Tank leans out the window and shoots the camera off the top of Jess’s car. This finally brings her to stop as she finally pulls over. They take her out the car as she explains to them that her job is to drive around an take images of the streets for Google. They don’t really understand what she’s telling them but instruct her that she needs to delete her last thirty minutes of images. She says she can’t as they’ve already been saved to the cloud and sent to the regional Google headquarters. They look up to the sky and ask if she is trying to pull their tail by implying that a website’s headquarters are in a cloud.
Tank yells that he can’t stand this and says they should just kill her. When he yells this, Jess’s car thinks he is prompting it to “call Stan” and that’s what it does. Jess awkwardly talks to her supervisor and asks about the process of deleting images while Lex and Tank look on intimidatingly. Stan explains that he can review the imagery and apply blurs but Lex and Tank motion “NO”. Jess says nevermind, no big deal and hangs up. She says that she can pull up the picture and show them what she captured, which they reluctantly agree to. She locates the image and finds that the two men were obscured anyway so the camera didn’t even capture the murder. They let out a sigh of relief and say that they’ll be on their way.
Before they get back to their car, she flags them down and says that they owe her. They look at each other like “what the hell?” and say that Google can pay for any damage to the car. She leans forward and says that she knows their faces very well now and could turn them into the police. Tank looks to Lex as if to say “let’s just kill her” but Lex asks what they can do to make her keep silent. She takes a second to think.
A few weeks later, Lex and Tank are sitting in the front seat of their car Jess all glittered up in the backseat dancing (and them looking miserable). They arrive in New Jersey after a road trip to arrive at a big football stadium. Cut to Jess singing her lungs out at the Spice Girls reunion tour as Lex and Tank stand next to her unimpressed. A girl next to her asks if who the rough-looking men are and if she is safe. Jess blows it off and says those are her two dads. She nudges them and they struggle to force a smiles onto their faces.
"Picture This is very slight in its ambitions. It doesn't try to do too much, but the film still manages to work thanks to the creative use of the various on-screen personas of its three stars"
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